Relationships between a referring Web site that provides a link to a merchant Web site that sells on-line an item advertised on the referring site are well known. The referring Web site is known in the art as an affiliate Web site of the merchant Web site. Generally, an affiliate site and its associated merchant site have a contractual arrangement in which the proprietors of the merchant site agree to pay the proprietors of the affiliate site a percentage of the purchases made by user who “arrives” at the merchant site via the link on the affiliate's Web page. Alternatively, a flat rate payment scheme may be used for compensating the affiliate or some combination or variant of these schemes. Various well known in the art mechanisms enable the merchant site to determine when a user arrives at that merchant site from an affiliate site. One such mechanism involves examining the packet header of the packets of the request arriving at the merchant site when the user clicks on the link on the Web page of the affiliate site. This header includes a reference to the address of the referring affiliate site from which the request originates. The merchant site can then track all subsequent steps taken by the user by using cookies or special encoding of the URLs as the user browses and adds items to his virtual shopping cart and makes a purchase. Another well known mechanism that enables the merchant site to determine that the user has arrived at its Web site via an affiliate site is through the use of encoded URLs that include both the item selected by the user on the affiliate site as well as an identifier of the affiliate site. No matter the method of associating a user/customer's transaction with the affiliate site that directed the user/customer to the merchant site, after the purchase has been completed and the user's credit card has been debited for the amount of the purchase, the merchant site will at some point credit the affiliate site with a percentage of the sale, or some other monetary compensation. Affiliate merchandising is financially beneficial to the proprietors of both the merchant and the affiliate sites. The merchant site is provided with a source of potential customers who are already browsing at a site whose content is directly related to that which the merchant site has to offer for sale, and the affiliate site is provided with a source of income that it would not otherwise have.
A user browsing the Web may be directed to a merchant site for the purpose of making a purchase of some item or service through various mechanisms. For example, a user browsing through the Barbra Streisand fan Web site at the URL www.barbrastreisand.com Web site may on one its pages view a selection of her CDs. By clicking on a link that says “Purchase Now” below a particular CD on such a Web page, the user's browser opens a new window and retrieves a Web page from the associated merchant site CDNow at the URL www.cdnow.com, which offers to the user that particular CD for purchase. By then clicking in that window on the “add to cart” link, that CD is added to the user's virtual shopping cart, the user being able to then or later complete the purchase of that CD. While at that merchant site, the user can purchase other CDs, or return to the URL www.barbrastreisand.com and click on another Barbra Streisand CD that he wishes to purchase. Thus, if the user wants to purchase multiple CDs, he needs repeatedly return to the affiliate site at www.barbrastreisand.com, click on the desired CD's “Purchase Now” link, and individually add that newly selected CD to his shopping cart. Alternatively, while at the CDNow Web site, the user needs to search for whatever other CD he wants to purchase and add that other CD to his shopping cart. When the user has completed filling his cart with the CDs he wishes to purchase, he enters a check-out phase of his transaction by providing his shipping address and credit card information to the merchant site if he is not previously known to that site through, for example, a cookie stored on his computer. Disadvantageously, such a procedure of individually selecting CDs from the affiliate's site and then adding them to his cart on the merchant's site is time-consuming and may cause users to order fewer CDs to the disadvantage of both the affiliate site and merchant site. Further, the affiliate is precluded from offering a user the purchase of a package of multiple CDs that might be of interest to a purchaser, such as, for example, Barbra Streisand's individual The Broadway Album and the Return to Broadway CDs unless the merchant site also offers them as a package on its Web page.
Although certain sites (e.g., http://www.netgrocer.com) enable a user to create and store lists of multiple items and to add the entire list to a shopping cart, such lists can only be accessed by the creator of the list. Further, such lists that may be available at a merchant site are accessible only by the user directly through the merchant site. As such, they are not useful for affiliate marketing where an offer of multiple items may be configured by the affiliate without any merchant site cooperation, and the offer is made available for acceptance to any visitor to the affiliate site.